Inconsistent thread settings / a tale of 100 threads

I have spent a fair amount of time navigating around the UI in BullGuard 2014 Internet Security 14.0.276.1, and something recently came to my attention.

After my browser-of-choice got unhappy about the general lack of available RAM and crashed, I re-started the application and resumed my previous session. Unsurprisingly my memory and CPU usage shot up again, but a large part of this was in an svchost instance, rather than the browser itself. Ever the inquisitive type I had a peek and noticed that this process was hosting BsMailProxy.dll (aka BullGuard e-mail monitoring service). This would be fine, except I had mail scanning disabled at the time, and opening new tabs in the browser correlated nicely with new threads starting up. With over 100 threads sitting there the memory usage for this process alone was a cool 355.6MB, which seems quite a lot for what is supposedly a disabled feature.

So this leaves me with three questions:
1. If file scan threads are 8, what is "number of scan threads" in the advanced options for the profiles?
2. If Web/Mail scan threads is 2, why are there over 100, and why am I able to start many more? (for example 15 new threads started with 2 new tabs loading webpages, that alone is well over this limit)
3. If this service is actually handling any of the web scan / safe results features in addition to email scanning, could you please rename the display name as it is wrong?

Incidentally, the BsMailProxy description is wrong anyway as it has been copy/pasted from the BsBhvScan service.

Looking forward to finding out what these settings are intended to do. All the best

I decided to test this myself in a rather sadistic manner as I've noticed some performance issues when opening websites with Bullguard Premium 14 installed on both mine, and my fiances machine. Settings are

File Scan Threads - 12
Web/Mail scan threads - 2
Mail filter disabled

As previous poster described, an svchost process shot up substantially in both RAM and CPU usage. The bullguard.exe process itself didn't go over 120+ mb of RAM but cpu usage was erratic and overall performance was very...jerky. Granted, most systems don't like opening 108 or so tabs in Google Chrome but I wanted to see how bad it could get.

Advanced member

That's most likely the Antiphishing engine that's going wild, in your case.
I will have to argue on the matter though. 200MB (with 100 actually working) is not that much, especially with as many tabs you have opened.
CPU was of course erratic, since it had to load and track so many pages with BullGuard also trying to protect all these pages and the traffic from it and so on.

I do not agree that your test is conclusive.

Yes, BsMailProxy handles more than one engine, so it's actually normal for it to have multiple threads. I did let our developers know about the name change.